News

World Brain Day 2016: Focus on Aging Brain Global Impact

The World Federation of Neurology (WFN) has designated July 22 as annual World Brain Day on which the WFN’s 119 national member groups will coordinate to raise awareness of brain health. For 2016, the campaign is focusing especially on “Brain Health and the Aging Population: The Aging Brain,”…

New Screening Tool May Improve Parkinson’s Disease Research

Diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s are associated with the formation of large protein aggregates that disrupt a variety of cellular functions. Now, researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT have developed a new system called yeast Transcriptional Reporting of Aggregating Proteins, or yTRAP, that can rapidly screen millions of…

Possible New Way of Treating Parkinson’s Found via Link to Gaucher Disease

While investigating links to Gaucher disease — a rare genetic condition with strong ties to Parkinson’s — researchers collaborating across three National Institutes of Health (NIH) centers reported finding a drug molecule potentially capable of treating Parkinson’s by reducing the clusters of aggregated α-synuclein inside cells. In doing so, the research…

Parkinson’s Disease Might Be Triggered By Traumatic Brain Injury

Researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York discovered that traumatic brain injury can often precede the development of Parkinson’s disease. The study “Association of Traumatic Brain Injury With Late-Life Neurodegenerative Conditions and Neuropathologic Findings,” published in …

Add-on Therapy for ‘Off’ Episodes in Parkinson’s, Ongentys, Approved for Use in Europe

Parkinson’s disease patients in Europe will soon have to access a new treatment option for their disease, after the European Commission (EC) approved the use of  Ongentys (opicapone) — developed and marketed by Bial — as an adjunctive therapy for patients with motor fluctuation. The drug, a third-generation catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) inhibitor, is approved as…